Novell Teaming (Boulder)

At the end of January, we asked Peter Hurley to demonstrate several of the new features that are planned for the upcoming release of Boulder. Boulder will be available to authorized beta sites in the coming weeks and is scheduled to ship later this year. Peter Hurley is one of several engineers that have been working on Boulder. His contributions, along with several other very innovative people, have created a product and features set that push productivity and collaboration throughout an organization.

Peter spent several hours demonstrating all of these features. They are very cool!! Those of you have already deployed Novell Teaming will be very excited about all of the improvements and new capabilities. Those of you who looking to improve your team productivity are going to have a plenty of eye candy, new capabilities and a great tool to help you collaborate better.

Here are a few of the features….

– Removal of the Liferay dependency: Liferay obviously brings many advantages, but allowing an organization the ability to deploy teaming without Liferay also has its advantages. Performance being one of the very significant improvements with this independence.

– Focus on ‘What’s Relevent to Me”: The capability to see ‘What’s New’ in a work space or folder and to be able to easily see what is ‘unread’ begin to highlight those things that may require a team member’s attention. Boulder will introduce a relevance dashboard to help bring the most important discussions, blogs, documents, etc right to your finger tips. Finally, ‘tracking’…the ability to ‘watch’ people, topics and information and be alerted when things change, new content is added and new people join a team.

– Significantly improved User Interactions: Teaming 1.0 had so many great features and capabilities. With Boulder the product exposes these features in a new, simpler, easy to learn, user interaction model. The engineers have spent a lot of time making sure there was a consistent and enhanced layout on every page. They have a new ‘masthead’ that creates an easy-to-use interaction no matter where you navigate. A new side bar and enhanced personal workspaces really make it easy to individualize, customize and personalize the information, content, layout and style that each team wants to portray.

We are working on some excellent ‘Getting Started’ videos that introduce the new functionality and help ease transition, training and learning from previous versions for existing customers and ‘introductions’ for new users.

– Scalability and Access: Significant improvements have been made to address scalability and high availability. We have introduced ‘multiple zones’, multiple Lucene search engine servers and multiple LDAP search queries. These changes add significant value to the performance enhancements as an enterprise grows and includes internal, as well as, external team members. In addition, we have provided ‘anonymous access’ so that workspaces and content can be accessible and viewable without having to create accounts, access control or other setup requirements. The ‘anonymous access’ capability requires an additional license.

I wanted to introduce you to just a few of the things that the engineering team and the product management team have been working on. There are many more features and capabilities that will be available and discussed as the product rolls through the development cycle. One of the areas that I will spend a significant amount of time describing and discussing in a future blog post will the the Integrations with GroupWise!

The engineering team is very excited and proud of this upcoming release. We know it will meet your expectations while opening your mind to all of the future possibilities!

Here are a few screen shots of the Relevance dashboard and the High Performance Team Workspace.

Disclaimer: This content is not supported by Novell. It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test it thoroughly before using it in a production environment.

The new look of Teaming 2.0 looks like a big improvement. I am looking forward to seeing what the public beta is like.

I have looked at other similar solutions. One of them that I really liked is a project called Alfresco. Alfresco has very good document management capabilities and also very good workflow/rules.

Things that I really liked about Alfresco were that you could access documents within the system over CIF’s or FTP which was really handy for people who just need to put documents into the solution but may not need all the extra capabilities. In any team you may have people who perform basic tasks and others who are across the whole complexity of the project, having simple CIF’s/FTP access to the solution allows some people to contribute to a project without needing to learn new tools.

Also very good in Alfresco is the workflow/rules. These extend beyond transitioning a document from one state to another: you can actually e.g. upload a Word document and have a PDF of the same document created in another folder. There were a lot of other options from memory and rules were extremely easy to create from a simple web GUI.

Anyway these are just ideas on how you might want to improve Teaming. If you look at Alfresco you might see some pretty cool things in there that are worth implementing.

We are looking at our competitors and will be adopting some of the best practices and ideas we see as well as provide our own innovations. On our roadmap, I’ve listed the issue about simply adding files into Teaming with our file system integrations and MS Office and OOo integrations (the details of both are still to be defined.)